Cannes: A Perspective From The Croisette

Cannes: A Perspective From The Croisette

This year’s 50th Cannes Film Festival has everything, but great movies.With the exception of Michael Winterbottom’s tearjerker morality check,“Welcome To Sarajevo,” and the well-received but overlong “Nil By Mouth” byactor-turned-director Gary Oldman, film after film unspooling in theGrand Theatre Lumiere have been less than fantastique. What’s the cause?A melange of reasons including starpower (sadly, Johnny Depp qualifiesas major celebrity wattage) and festival politics (the 1997 BerlinFestival already awarded kudos to stunning films like Taiwanese gem “The River” by Tsai Ming-Liang (“Vive L’Amour”), ghettoized to Cannes marketscreenings in twenty-seat theaters).

Granted, at this halfway point the competition films are starting toimprove, particularly with “The Eel,” new from Japanese director and PalmeD’or winner Shohei Imamura (“The Ballad Of Narayama”) and AngLee’s dark, impressive “The Ice Storm” — but no movie yet has electrifiedthe audiences like 1994’s “Pulp Fiction” or last year’s “Secrets And Lies.”

If anything, festival darlings Marco Bellochio (“China Is Near”) and WimWenders (“Paris, Texas”) have fallen flat with missteps “The Prince OfHomburg” and “The End Of Violence”: the former is light, dull and preachy;the latter is pretentious, dull and preachy. Thankfully the latest fromAtom Egoyan, Mattieu Kassovitz and Wong Kar-Wei have yet to debut,fueling the hope for celluloid epiphanies. And in a last-minutediplomatic coup, the Iranian government has allowed Abbas Kiarostami’s A“Taste Of Cherry” to compete with the rest. So, as they say, it ain’t over’till it’s over.

Outside the Grand Palais’s 2,500 official selection theater, though, awealth of worthy movies are being screened in sidebar series like UnCertain Regard, Director’s Fortnight, and Critic’s Week — many, likeAmerican prizewinners “Sunday” and “In The Company Of Men” straight fromSundance. And in the market screenings (special paid exhibitions forinternational distributors) are older films by competition directorslike Manuel Poirier (“Western”), side-by-side movies like the Germanblockbuster “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” And snuggled against officialselections are special non-competition showings of Abel Ferrara’s “The Blackout”(generally considered a self-indulgent soft-core bore) andnonagenarian Manouel De Oliveira’s latest (and Marcello Mastroianni’slast) “Voyage To The Center Of The World.” Stopping John Malkovich in thestreet for an opinion about working with the now 91-year old director(the actor was in Oliveira’s The Convent”), I asked if the old man wasstill lucid. Looking malevolent with his bald head but soundingabsolutely charming, Malkovich replied, “He was… uh… yes… um…very… lucid.”

But who needs great films anyway on the half-century of the Riviera’sgreatest movie festival? Fireworks, the French president, trumpetinggendarmes on horseback and literally dozens and dozens of cinematicroyalty have overflowed into the Croisette, including Martin Scorsese,Gerard Depardieu, Charlton Heston, and a who’s who of internationaldirectors: Michaelangelo Antonioni, Andrej Wajda, Chen Kaige, FrancescoRosi, and Emir Kusturica just to name a few (and not to mention all fiveflavors of the Spice Girls).

The parties haven’t been too shabby either: hanging around Ciby 2000‘sMoroccan rockin’ beach shindig for “The End Of Violence” were David Lynchas well as a slightly tipsy Gabriel Byrne bitching about someone’ssuggestion that there be a sequel to “The Usual Suspects”: “I mean, mycharacters’ fucking dead, you know?” And in timely anniversarialfashion, New Line feted its own 30th in a birthday blowout thatoverflowed from the Palm Beach casino, where exclusivity was de rigeurand the VIP room boasted Francis Ford Coppola, Lauren Bacall, StevenSoderbergh, Gena Davis and Renny Harlin, Sean Young, Gina Gershon andPicasso-faced Spainiard Rossy De Palma. When I asked Coppola about hisonce-ambitious plans to make a guerilla-style B&W 16mm indie adaptationof Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” (open casting was held last year in NewYork and L.A.), he admitted that “We can’t do it anymore,” and turnedhis attention back to the disco-fevered French filles jiggling on thedance floor.

So that’s the latest from Cannes at the halfway point. Much has yet tohappen and more is still to come. Thankfully the rain has lifted andsunshine is starting to pour though the sky once more, adding yetanother distraction to the day’s busy indoor events.

[Stephen Garret is a film editor and freelancer writer for numerouspublications including MetroBeat online.]